


Sweetshrub

by carriecmoney



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Excessive Use Of Plant Imagery, Gen, Queerplatonic Relationships, Snow
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-06
Updated: 2016-12-06
Packaged: 2018-09-06 22:56:32
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,099
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8772670
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carriecmoney/pseuds/carriecmoney
Summary: から: 岩ちゃんMeet me outside11月28日(日曜日)15:49から: クソ川I was wondering how long you would last! Your house or mine?11月28日(日曜日)15:49Hajime leans forward to see more than grey sky and white dots, but a brown square of grass fading down into flowerbeds run wild. The snow has just started to stick, an edged glow like a pale sunrise.から: 岩ちゃんMine11月28日(日曜日)15:50





	

**Author's Note:**

> {A/N: Honestly, I just wanted to let Hajime talk at me for a minute, I missed his voice. Sweetshrub is a native American plant, but my hometown's ecosystem is crawling with invasive Japanese plants so they can take just this one from me. [tumblr](http://carriecmoney.tumblr.com) [twitter](http://www.twitter.com/carriecmoney)}

Hajime knows Tooru like his own backyard. He always has, since he could walk in it, since he knew the different between normal skin and his family’s and Tooru’s. His wrists feel like the lambsear growing by the basil, soft and delicate, easily marred by a fingernail or a pinecone to the head. He knows them, knows where to tread lightly to avoid the prickers and what wood he can throw his whole weight into, what parts he can roll in the sunshine and when to drag them both inside to wait out a rainstorm at the window.

They venture as it grows, legs shooting out to explore the tangled undergrowth underneath the powerlines between the houses, the ruined tire swing hung so even if it wasn’t rotting it wouldn’t swing, shaking with the give of leaf litter when they jump out of a tree they had no business climbing, together. He knows more than Tooru’s wrists now – the ruffle of his hair, what his joints look like shredded by a fall on asphalt. He’s seen his nails torn to shreds, knows that kisses don’t make it better but they tried for a while. They stopped trying when they stopped believing the holly bush at the edge of the wilderness was a marker to a spirit world.

In high school he forgets about his backyard unless his mom makes him weed. Tooru becomes Oikawa, the same human that collected fallen camellia blooms with him in the late winter and dragged ants into the house, but at arm’s length. Only touched when caretaking.

It’s the first snowfall of their last year. The coffee Hajime made three hours ago is tepid and bitter on his desk, forgotten as he pounds through his homework. Weather outside muffling the sounds of traffic and birds and kids and trees in the wind. He takes a sip of his coffee without looking and makes a face at its cold sting. He puts it back and sighs, stretching out in his desk chair and feeling the burn in between his shoulders. He watches snow fall out the window, blinking as the focus he had worked so hard to narrow scatters like a kicked snowbank. He picks up his phone.

から: 岩ちゃん  
Meet me outside  
11月28日(日曜日)15:49

から: クソ川  
I was wondering how long you would last! Your house or mine?  
11月28日(日曜日)15:49

He leans forward to see more than grey sky and white dots, but a brown square of grass fading down into flowerbeds run wild. The snow has just started to stick, an edged glow like a pale sunrise.

から: 岩ちゃん  
Mine  
11月28日(日曜日)15:50

He puts on his winter boots but doesn’t bother changing his sweatshirt for a heavier coat. His mom is grading papers at the kitchen table, and since he got his focus problem from her he doesn’t bother her as he slips out the back door onto the porch. It’s just slush on the wood, so he stumps through it until he can jump over the three steps onto the millimeter of crunchy snow crusting the dead lawn. It cracks like he hopes, and he smiles.

Azalea bushes crash to the left, and he straightens to watch Oikawa beat them back, knit hat low over his forehead and bare hands red. Hajime hides the growth of his smile and stuffs his fists in his sweatshirt pocket. “You could always go around,” he says, voice cracking after hours of silence.

“This is- _easier_ ,” Oikawa snaps, shaking his foot free of clinging branches. He stumbles a few steps, then catches himself and straightens his coat. “Stir-crazy, Iwa-chan?”

Hajime shrugs, then looks up, white points falling around him like a star field. “Felt weird,” he says, “not running around like brats when it snows the first time. Doing _homework_.”

Oikawa sighs, stepping closer but not enough to share heat. “Stop growing up on me,” he whines. Hajime watches out of the corner of his eye as he tilts his head back, closes his eyes and opens his mouth, tongue out. Hajime tucks a grin away.

“Someone’s gotta be the adult to your child.” Oikawa gives up on his snowflake fishing to scowl at him.

“No one said either of us _needed_ to be an adult at all.” He stalks through the grass to where the yard slopes into soaked pine straw and dormant lilies. Hajime follows in his dead-grass track through spotty white. There’s old log steps in the corner, leading down to the next tier of the yard. Oikawa usually jumps them two at a time, but they’re slick with almost-ice now so he walks down like normal, hands out to the side. Hajime follows two steps up, eyes sticking on the strip of skin between his hat and coat collar. He used to know what that place felt like. He used to know there was a cavity around the nail on this log-step he just stumbled on. Did he bury those facts underneath his schoolwork?

He reaches out to touch it. Oikawa yelps and jumps at the contact, hopping the last step to spin and glare at Hajime, eyes blazing as he slaps both hands to the back of his neck. “ _Cold_ , Iwa-chan!”

“Oh.” He forgot about that. He pauses a step up, bushes on either side of the stairs keeping him from passing around Oikawa. “Sorry.”

“ _Sorry?_ ” He glares at Hajime, closer and stiller than he’s been in a while. “Don’t say that was an _accident?_ ”

“Sort of.” Oikawa has spots all across his face, blemishes that are darker than freckles but lighter than moles. He played connect-the-dots with the once with a magic marker in excuse for Oikawa giving him a (really terrible) haircut. There’s new ones now, like the fig tree across the yard Hajime doesn’t remember being there. He kind of wants to find the constellations they make again, even he has to invent them. There’s one right at the top of his lip-

“Iwa-chan?”

Hajime blinks, snow on his eyelashes blurring his vision. “Sorry.”

Oikawa frowns, hands falling from his neck to his sides. “You just apologized to me twice in a minute. What’s up.”

“Nothing, just…” He looks away from warm brown to the cold brown of a dead privet hedge. He flexes his toes in his boots. “Just one of those weird-ass existential moments.” He hunches his shoulders in. “It’s gone now.”

Oikawa hums, steps back so Hajime’s not blocked in. “Sure.” The snow is sticking to his hair now, wet spots a darker brown where it fluffs out from under his hat, bouncing as he keeps on down the pavestone path through the empty soybean plots.

They fall onto their old route through the yard, through the vegetable beds that used to house irises to the sweetshrub tunnel to the back of the Iwaizumi family property. “How much of your homework did you get to before you cracked?” Oikawa asks.

“Enough.” He cuts his eyes at Oikawa. “How much sleep did you get last night after watching game videos?”

Oikawa laughs. “Enough.” He spins on his heel at the start of the tunnel, throwing his arms out and shaking the snow off a sweetshrub branch. “Guess we’re both awful!”

“You’re worse.” Hajime breaks off the last maroon flower from the sweetshrub, holding it to his nose and breathing in. “Do I have to watch you sleep to make sure you do? Set up a nannycam or some shit?”

Oikawa gasps. “An invasion of privacy if I ever heard one! What if you watch me undress?” Hajime levels the flattest glare he can at Oikawa, spinning the dusty stem in his fingers and scattering a few snowflakes. Oikawa grins with a snort. Hajime wants to throw the flower at him, but that’s a waste of a nice perfume. Instead he tucks it behind his own ear and plods on, ducking under evergreen to take the lead. The plant canopy is thick enough here that the snow hasn’t filtered through, dark spots against the growing white landscape. Something snatches at his hood – he reaches back to unsnag the branch and brushes Oikawa’s knuckles. “Hey.”

He takes the hand off and turns – lets it go. Oikawa’s face twitches, hunched over like him to fit under the shrubbery, and he _really_ wants to touch that mole-freckle on his lip. “Yeah?”

Oikawa takes the flower dangling from his ear, fingers brushing the frigid ridges. He sniffs it, eyes flicking around their three-meter tunnel. “I’m feeling it too.” He breathes in sweetshrub. “That weird-ass moment.”

Hajime swallows. “Tooru.” Oikawa blinks his eyes open. “Can I be really weird for a second?”

His forehead furrows. “You’re always really weird, Iwa-chan.”

He reaches out to thumb Oikawa’s upper lip, hand cupping his jaw. The freckle doesn’t feel any different than the skin around it, lotion soft and deep, like he’s got an extra layer of lambsear over it. Oikawa’s breath puffs into his palm. “Okay,” he mumbles, lip moving under Hajime’s callous, “that’s pretty weird.” Hajime jerks his hand away and swallows his third apology of the day.

“You had- snow on your face,” he grumbles, thumping towards the holly at the end of the tunnel. Oikawa runs after him a beat later, catching up at the holly bush. It’s twice as tall as it used to be, towering over them at basketball goal height, two bird’s nests buried in its thorns. Oikawa huffs.

“Remember when this was our magic portal?” Oikawa shakes subtle jazz hands – the sweetshrub flower is behind his ear now, secured under the edge of his hat. “Crawl through this hole down here to meet the kami!” He crouches to peer at the roots. “Not much of a hole anymore.”

“Never was.” Hajime crouches beside him, scraping snow into a dirty palmful – not enough for a ball yet. “But we tore our clothes to shit trying.” He packs the palm of snow down, starts to scrap up another. His hands are fat and heavy from the cold, but he ignores it. Oikawa hums and sits back from his crouch, stretching his legs in front of him and knocking his boots’ soles together, leaning back on his hands as he stares up at the holly tree. Hajime shuffles sideways to reach more snow.

“You’re not gonna be able to do anything with that for a while,” Oikawa comments, not looking away from the holly tree. Hajime’s lip curls, but he lets his pad of snow fall and sits next to Oikawa, a person of space between them and a heavy sole of difference between their leg length. Oikawa’s boots click together.

Hajime watches his smiling profile, the wrinkles where his hat rides up, the carved line of freckles from his eye down to the lip one, the snow gathering on the frizz of hair and wool. His own ears and hands are freezing; he yanks his hood up and stuffs his hands in his pockets, curling in for warmth. Oikawa looks over at the movement and grins. “That’s what you get for coming out here in just a sweatshirt,” he croons, scooting closer so he can lean his meager warmth into Hajime’s side. “Need to go in?”

Hajime returns the lean, shrugging with his other shoulder. “In a minute. My butt’s not frozen yet.” Oikawa laughs, and Hajime looks around at the varied bushes they’re hiding in. “It’s been ages since I’ve been all the way back here.” Oikawa hums. “But it hasn’t changed that much.”

“No, that’s not how plants really work.” Oikawa worms his arm around Hajime’s, elbow in elbow. “They’re smaller than they used to be, though.”

Hajime looks up at the three meter holly tree. “Yeah.”

They stare for about ten more seconds before Oikawa heaves a sigh and hops to his feet, dragging Hajime’s arm and then his body with him. “Well, I’m bored.” He brushes snow off Hajime’s shoulders, evens out the strings on Hajime’s hood. “C’mon, let’s go let Miso out and chase her around some.” He grins and flicks Hajime’s nose. He blinks – growls – but Oikawa’s already gone, laughing as he ducks under the sweetshrub tunnel back to the house, grazing the branches overhead with a hand as he goes and shaking down loose snow onto the clean pine straw. He looks back at the end, hands on his knees so he can wink at Hajime. The sweetshrub flower falls from his hat to the ground. “Coming?” he asks, running on before getting his answer.

Hajime sighs, crouch-walking to pick up the fallen flower and follow.


End file.
